Platform Five: This week’s most important social media changes (edition 154)

This week’s 5 most important social media changes

What’s changed in the last seven days? What does it mean?

Facebook is trying to stamp out content scrapers, YouTube is making changes to their TrueView metric and Twitter is adding more context to trending tweets.

Let’s take a look at these changes in more detail.

Facebook’s News Feed now downranks stolen content

We’re almost surprised that this hasn’t been implemented earlier but Facebook has changed their algorithm to downrank content that they deem to be stolen. If stolen content receives less News Feed distribution, the publisher will have fewer traffic referrals and earn less revenue for the hundreds of ads they put on their pages which could make stealing content seem less desirable.

Twitter is testing ‘annotations’ in moments

If you’ve been paying attention to Twitter mentions recently, you might’ve noticed little boxes of contextual information appearing. These are what Twitter is calling moment ‘annotations’. Annotations aim to clarify and provide context for trending tweets. They currently only appear in the mobile app.

LinkedIn now lets you switch your profile button from ‘Connect’ to ‘Follow’

Until now, the option to allow people to follow you rather than connect with you has been reserved for members of LinkedIn’s inFluence program. The feature is now being rolled out to all users and you can make the change under the privacy settings tab.

YouTube changes video ad engagement measurement

The time spent watching a video before it counts as a view differs from platform to platform. YouTube had the longest time with views only counting towards the TrueView metric after a user watched for 30 seconds. Now they’re reducing that time to 10 seconds to “better reflect the impact of video ads”.

Facebook introduces Messenger to Groups

Facebook wants to encourage group users to interact more so they’re bringing Messenger to Facebook groups. Group chats will be able to have up to 250 members and host video or audio calls with up to 50 members. Any group member can start a chat but admins will be able to shut down chats or limit the ability to create them.